by Alice Castle
Maybe that was another reason to abandon dating? The whole business with York seemed to get nowhere, Tinder was frankly terrifying, and her little tête à tête with Richard today had not convinced her that she was missing a lot.
‘Did I tell you I went on a date today?’ she said teasingly to Katie, knowing the snippet would fall, like a grenade, on the calm waters of their afternoon.
Katie, transfixed, paused with the teabag-laden teaspoon dripping great gobs of Earl Grey onto her gleaming Travertine floor.
‘You’re kidding,’ she said. Once she’d scraped her eyebrows off the ceiling and mopped the tiles to boot, Katie sat down and demanded every detail.
Exhausted by the time she’d recounted everything, including the unfortunate sighting by York and their subsequent chat on the pavement, Beth sat back and watched Katie compute it all. For some reason, the only thing she hadn’t divulged was that little kiss that she and York had shared in her hallway the other evening. Because that, well, it wasn’t important, was it? Or even relevant. This story had all been about Richard.
‘I’m a bit surprised you hadn’t already heard every single detail from Belinda, anyway. Turns out she and this Richard guy’s ex, Felicity, are big chums,’ joked Beth.
‘There is a missed call on my phone from Belinda,’ admitted Katie, with a little moue of distress on behalf of her friend. ‘So she was probably putting out an all-areas alert. Do you want me to play the message?’ she said, glancing down at her phone.
‘No! Please don’t. Oh great,’ said Beth, down in the dumps at the thought of being number one topic of conversation at drop-off and pick-up tomorrow, with all the flicking of sidelong glances and suddenly-shushed conversations that entailed. ‘Well, I suppose my only hope is that something else might happen tonight, to knock me off the news agenda.’
‘That’s not very likely, is it? Actually, I think I’ve met this Felicity. She was at Belinda’s last week. She seemed to have a man in tow, but she was very flirty,’ Katie said, her expression pained.
It wasn’t like Katie – normally sweetness and light – to notice such behaviour, or to comment on it so tartly. She must have been annoyed by the woman, Beth thought. Possibly, Felicity had even tried it on with Michael, not that he’d ever look at another woman. Well, Beth didn’t think he would. But you could never be sure, could you? The human heart had many chambers, some hidden even from their owners until the worst was done. Beth chased away the sombre thought and got on with enjoying the evening with her friend instead, which was much easier to do when they’d got off the subject of her date and onto the doings of the rest of Dulwich instead.
There was plenty to say, as usual. Much of the speculation that wasn’t temporarily beamed on her concerned the very annoying recent closure of the village Post Office, and the much more pleasing rumour that it was about to be replaced by a Waitrose. Beth was rightly suspicious of such talk. Every time any shop closed down, there was talk of Waitrose moving in. But all that usually happened was that another short-lived, madly-priced cushion emporium blossomed, only to wither once the horrible truth that you can actually have too many cushions was proved beyond reasonable doubt to the disillusioned proprietor.
Beth wasn’t immune to the lure of cushions. Like most men, James had suffered from an acute allergy to them, but since his death most of the chairs in her house had sprouted at least one, and when they got tatty they had to be replaced. She didn’t go as far as the design magazines exhorted, and change her covers to match the seasons. But there were many in Dulwich who did, including people like Katie and Belinda, whose soft-furnishings budgets seemed to be as unlimited as the oceans.
A Waitrose, though? Ah, that was the dream. Both women gazed into the middle distance for a moment, contemplating the paradise on earth that would be Dulwich with a Waitrose. For Beth, it meant slightly healthier, though more expensive, fish fingers. For Katie, it was the promise of never-ending leafy green vegetables to stuff her best-beloved boy with. Which reminded them, it was time for the boys to eat.
Beth proudly watched her son chomping his way stoically through mounds of organic cavolo nero, which he understood was the price to be paid for an evening with his best friend. Then it was time to go.
Sitting at home later, with a restorative glass of wine and the remains of a peanut butter sandwich – the quickest and easiest way of filling herself up that she could think of – she realised she’d forgotten to do two things. She hadn’t texted Janice and, more importantly, she still hadn’t got round to reporting Jen missing.
Ah well, the first was probably not important. And so much time had already gone by on the second issue that another day’s delay surely wouldn’t be crucial, she thought, as she trundled off to bed, leaving Magpie on the sofa digesting a gourmet dinner which had contained far more nutrients than Beth’s own.
Chapter Thirteen
It was the first of the late autumn days that had that miserable, grudging feel about it, thought Beth, as she tried to wipe the wet fringe out of her eyes for the umpteenth time. She’d set off without an umbrella, as the fine mist had looked as though it would clear quickly. But those deceptive droplets had turned into a mean, cold drizzle, determined to seep through the cracks in her pixie boots and drip coldly off her hair down the collar of her coat. She hoped Ben would be okay all day in his light parka coat. At least his boots were sound. They’d been bought only last week from the shoe shop opposite the Village Primary, when she’d realised in horror that his back-to-school shoes, which she’d fondly imagined would last till February, had suddenly become distinctly too small. He was getting far too much cavolo nero from Katie, that was the trouble, and it was making him sprout, she thought with a grin that illuminated her grey eyes and cheered the porter at the gates of Wyatt’s.
Through the mist, the green of the lawn in front of the school looked even more velvety than usual. Beth didn’t linger to admire it, but hurried in past the heavy double doors and on past Reception to the warren of corridors where Beth liked to think the real work of the school went on, far from the pupils and teachers. This was the engine room of the huge organisation, where the fees were raked in and processed, the arcane admissions magic was worked, and where – a small but important cog – her institute covered the inglorious history of the wicked old swashbuckler who’d been their founder and benefactor, Sir Thomas Wyatt. She worked her away along the corridors, passing the Bursar’s office quickly but lingering to say good morning to the development office team.
Then, at her own office door, she paused. It was open. Surely she’d closed it yesterday afternoon? She hadn’t locked it, that was true, which was strictly against school rules, particularly after everything that had happened at the school recently. She’d meant to get Janice to nip down and secure it for her, but it had gone right out of her head.
Her heart was hammering now, and she took a deep breath before stepping forward very gingerly. Bearing in mind that she’d recently received a nasty blow to the head, and with no desire at all to repeat the trip to the hospital, Beth peeped cautiously round the door. She was almost relieved when she saw the chaos within. It looked as though someone had done a very thorough job of messing the place up, but there didn’t seem to be anyone lurking anywhere in the shadows with a rounders bat. She felt her knees sag a little in relief, and she steadied herself on the doorframe, working up the courage to step over the threshold to have a proper check.
Though it was a massive upgrade on her first quarters at the school, it still wasn’t a palatial office, just a generous rectangular box. There were blinds at the window, rather than curtains to hide behind. She could see under her conference table from here, and the space was intruder-free, as was the dark area under her knee-hole desk. There was still one possible hiding place, though. She tiptoed into the room as quietly as she could, and then flung open the door of the cupboard where she usually stowed her coat and bag. Any miscreant would have to be even weenier than her to get inside this, she
realised. She felt rather silly, once she was looking at the tiny, dusty locker, but she’d had to check.
Now she was sure the place was definitely empty, she could stand safely in the centre of the room and have a good look at the damage, relieved on one hand but pretty dismayed on the other. There were drifts of paper all around her, and her beloved books had been shoved unceremoniously off the shelves, here, there, and everywhere. She felt like crying as she contrasted the tidy, organised, efficient office she’d left in a hurry yesterday, with the maelstrom of random, torn, and dirty papers she was standing in now. But as a veteran of several attempts to intimidate her with spiteful burglaries, she knew this looked a lot worse than it actually was.
If she wasn’t mistaken, the documents that had taken the white heat of the perpetrator’s rage were the leather-bound volumes of the Wyatt’s Chronicles, a desperately dull school newsletter that had been published with grim regularity for far, far too long in the interwar years when the place had been run by a head who was a lame donkey by comparison to the current sleek thoroughbred, Dr Grover. Beth now thanked her stars for this publication. Though it could induce irreversible coma in anyone unwise enough to dip into its foxed pages, as a vehicle to absorb the aggression of an angry burglar, it couldn’t have been more useful.
She started hefting the volumes back onto their shelves, not worrying over-much that many of the pages were now ripped or creased. Nobody in their right mind would be reading them anyway. By the time she’d shoved them all back into line, the room really didn’t look too bad at all.
It was just the area around her desk that needed attention now. Her drawers had been emptied, and a rich trove of tampons, headache pills, stubs of chocolate bars, and retired hair scrunchies, had been strewn around like a lumpy and distinctly Tracey Emin-style take on confetti. The tampons, in particular, had been stamped on so hard that some of them had burst out of their pastel-coloured packaging, and lay forlorn, like dead white mice littering up the place. What a waste, Beth thought, bending down, picking them up, and dumping them unceremoniously in the now overflowing rubbish bin. She crushed everything down with her foot, then realised this was precisely the action that the horrible burglar had been carrying out all over her possessions. At once, this intrusion changed from an attack on a worker at Wyatt’s, to a much more personal assault. You couldn’t really get much more intimate than Tampax.
Before she had started clearing up, she’d had a moment when she wondered whether she should just yell down the corridor for Janice, or even phone York straight away and report the break-in. But it was her own fault, wasn’t it? She should have locked the door. They were all under strict instructions that security was paramount. And while there was no sensitive information in Beth’s office, and the slavery issue was now well known after Dr Grover’s many TV appearances, the last thing the school would want was marauding protesters shredding their precious documents, shortly to form the bedrock of Beth’s slavery exhibition. Luckily, the now-famous ledgers prepared by Wyatt’s team of clerks were already safely enshrined in glass cases in the school foyer for all to see, and would just be moved into position for whatever exhibition Beth dreamed up next.
That didn’t stop Beth feeling guilty, though. She was supposed to be the custodian of this rich array of materials, and an important part of her duties was to keep it all safe. She couldn’t afford for word to get out that she’d simply left the door unlocked. If the idea of this burglary was to embarrass her, it had been extremely effective. But who would be wandering around the school, feeling so malign towards her? Who had she annoyed or offended?
True, she wasn’t always tactful. She sometimes got people’s backs up, accidentally, with her forthright views on this or that. But would anyone seriously be annoyed enough at her take on house prices – the only subject in Dulwich which really inflamed passions – to trash her office? Or was this, could it be, connected to that nasty bash on the head outside Jen’s house? Was all this tied in with her friend’s strange disappearance? And if it was, surely there was only one person in the world who had a motive?
Even if she didn’t want to admit to York that she’d been stupid enough to leave her office door unlocked, she needed to report Jen officially missing, and start taking action. If her suspicions were right, everything was pointing in one direction and she had to do something about it.
By the time she’d finished getting everything ship-shape again, she was scarlet in the face and quite dusty. Even though the books hadn’t been on these shelves long before they’d been flung around the place, they’d still managed to attract surprising quantities of thick, south London grime. Beth supposed it was the dreaded South Circular, sprinkling liberal quantities of filth across its path, the direct opposite of fairy dust. The bin was now full of pages of the Chronicle which were unsalvageable, some bearing dirty, but surprisingly neat, footprints, which Beth was sure weren’t hers. These were layered on top of the wreckage of her chocolate stash, tampons, and other odds and ends – successfully concealing them, Beth noted.
Wiping her hands ineffectually on the back pockets of her jeans, she popped along to the loo just along the corridor – after assiduously locking her own particular stable door, of course – and looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. Hmm. Hair everywhere. Check. Cheeks flushed. Check. Smudges of dust on her face, hands, and clothes. Check. Could she get away with saying it had been an extremely hectic morning in the archives? Probably not. She did the best she could to remedy all these things, then dashed off to visit Janice.
Serenely studying her computer screen, a huge crystal bouquet of red roses dominating her desk, Janice looked edible in the light streaming from one of the big windows, showing the slice of verdant grass outside. The early drizzle had gone and mellow autumn sunlight caressed the gentle planes of her face. She looked up and smiled as Beth stuck her head around the door.
‘Come in, sit down,’ she said. If she thought her friend was looking unusually casual, even for her, she didn’t say a word.
Beth rubbed at a dusty patch on her jeans as she got comfy in the chair, and tried to loop her hair more tidily behind her ears. She’d done her best with it just now in the mirror, but something about this morning’s chaos had transmitted itself to her unruliest feature, and the calm and peace of Janice and her surroundings seemed to be pointing up the contrast in a rather cruel way.
‘Having trouble with your laptop this morning, are you?’ said Janice expectantly.
‘Er, no, why do you ask?’ said Beth, put off her stride by this unexpected start. Her laptop was about the one thing in her office that wasn’t misbehaving – as far as she knew. She hadn’t even turned it on yet.
‘Oh, it’s just that we had a major computer glitch yesterday afternoon. I popped round to your office to see if you were affected, but you weren’t there,’ said Janice.
‘What time was this?’ Beth was instantly alert.
‘Oh, must have been about 2ish, 2.30. Before you left for the day, anyway. I saw your note, though.’
Hmm, thought Beth. Little did Janice know that the note, written in reasonably good faith – though deliberately opaque in its wording – had been over-optimistic about her return to the office.
‘What was the computer problem? The Intranet?’ Beth asked hopefully. The Intranet was the school’s major information loop, almost as dull as the Chronicle, and harder to escape than one of the circles of Hell.
‘No, it was everything. For some reason, the whole lot went down. And it would happen the week when our IT guy is away on holiday. Luckily, I managed to get someone to sort it at really short notice. Someone you know, actually.’
‘Oh? Who was that?’ Beth was listening with half an ear now, still mulling over who could possibly have gained access to her office. Who did she know, with a grudge against her, who wanted to make her life more difficult? Was it really anyone at the school? She got on well with everybody, she thought. It was hard to imagine who disliked her enough t
o cause such havoc.
‘Oh, that guy, Jeff. I think he’s married to your friend, Jen?’
Suddenly Beth had the curious feeling that everything in the office had just come much closer to her, that colours had become unmistakably sharp, and that noises, including Janice’s mellifluous voice, were shriekingly loud.
‘Hang on. Say that again. Jeff was dealing with our IT, yesterday afternoon?’
‘Yes, he was on it right away, as soon as I emailed him. Are you all right, Beth? You’ve gone white as a sheet.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Beth grimly, though there was a ringing in her ears and she was gripping the sides of her chair with both hands. ‘Just tell me what happened. Please.’
‘It’s just like I said,’ Janice seemed mystified. ‘Some weird computer freeze-up affecting us all, and I just found the first emergency IT contact in the folder, which turned out to be this chap, Jeff. He was great, actually.’
‘I can’t believe you got him to help.’ Beth leaned forward, aghast.
‘I’d have thought you’d be pleased,’ Janice remonstrated. ‘He’s your friend’s hubby, after all. But it was a one-off; our usual guy will be back on Monday. It was a bit manic round here yesterday afternoon. They’ve been interviewing for a new marketing person. Well, you know what it’s like. Advertise for anything, even a loo cleaner, and the place is swamped with applicants.’